it's not always the fate of the world
by najella
Summary: Rani likes to win, Luke cheats at board games, and Clyde doesn't have a crush on anyone.


For lack of anything better to do, 'better' including such concepts as cleaning their rooms, hunting aliens, and their history homework, Monday evening was spent in the attic with a trashy old board game Rani had found in one of Sarah Jane's endless cupboards. It was one of those games with light up plastic pieces and play-doh that everyone loved back in the 90s for girly sleepovers, although that didn't really explain why Sarah Jane had one. Clyde speculated it was possessed by a veil-form alien.

As an excuse to set it up, she decided it should be part of Luke's crash course through Everything That was Cool in the Last Two Decades And Would Be Weird Not to Know About, although Clyde countered that Luke was a guy and therefore would never be called upon to talk about his intimate sleepover board game knowledge. Though he agreed that an evening spent mucking around with a game sounded better than hoovering his mum's kitchen.

They decided on the attic since Sarah Jane was on the warpath downstairs over some chore that hadn't been run, and Luke's room was too messy for hanging out. Luke curled up on the step while Rani leant against the sawn-off pillar and Clyde seized his chance to sprawl over the rest of the floor. Mister Smith whirred quietly in the background, running a check on some bit of alien kit Sarah Jane had stolen from NASA or UNIT or some other government operation, that was maybe going to end the world in a couple of hours.

Rani brushed her hair back behind her shoulder, her cheek dimpled in that cute way she had. She was wearing this lacy dress thing, which would have looked grandma or 'Janie's first confirmation' on anyone else, but that hadn't stopped Clyde staring at her when she was looking the other way. It was ridiculous behaviour. Everyone at school knew how ridiculous it was, up to and including Luke, which was how Clyde knew he was really in trouble. He didn't even like Rani like that.

'I call Luke,' Rani announced, interrupting his thoughts. She selected a purple hippo and placed it on the starting square.

'What?' Clyde spluttered, outraged. It wasn't like he cared or anything, but the hell did she want to team up with Luke over him? 'You can't just icall/i Luke, we're best mates, he wants to be on my team.'

'This can be for up to four players,' Luke noted, picking up the box to read the back. They ignored him.

'Aw Clydey, you've never played before, remember? Luke will pick it up faster if someone who knows what they're doing is helping him.'

Luke smiled awkwardly. 'I think I can understand the rules of a board game.'

'I'm awesome at explaining things, okay? You're obviously trying to bump your score on the trivia questions.'

'And you aren't?'

'You know what?' Luke called over their heads, emphatically pointing to the stairs. 'I'm on my own team, this is Team Smith. Seceding from all alliances.' He was giving them an exasperated look that was becoming more common these days. Maybe Clyde's memory was more of an optimist than Clyde himself, but he thought Luke used to have a sense of perspective about this stuff. Arguments and insults used to roll off him. Now he was annoyed by practically everything, and lately, Clyde and Rani in particular.

Rani frowned at Clyde and Clyde tutted at Rani, and they made the mutual decision to form Team iAwesome/i and beat him into the ground.

It was working out marginally well. Luke's score was bumped up slightly through the matchstick logic puzzles, but he turned out to be stumped by all questions relating to 90s footballers and Saturday morning European cartoons. Which was most of them.

'Alan Shearer was transferred to Newcastle for…' Luke stared off at Sarah Jane's bookcase, while Clyde drummed his fingers on the game board. If Luke had read the answer before, he would have said it by now, so Clyde had no idea if he was trying to x-ray vision an encyclopaedia or what.

Mister Smith cleared his throat. Which was weird, really, because it wasn't like he had one. They turned expectantly to him, Luke starting to rise in case he had to warn Sarah Jane downstairs of an impending alien threat.

'I believe the answer you are looking for is fifteen million pounds, making Alan Shearer the most expensive player in Europe in 1996.'

'Okay,' Luke grinned, moving one of his plastic hippos five steps forward. But his road to victory was cut off when Rani slammed her pack of question cards down in his tiny plastic path.

'Oi, hang on!'

Luke look puzzled. 'What, did he get it wrong?' he half-whispered, in case he hurt Mister Smith's feelings. That was probably smart, because barring any memory-altering viruses, Mister Smith held grudges.

'I assure you, I did not,' Mister Smith replied serenely.

Clyde wobbled his head and stuck his tongue inside his bottom lip with a playground taunting noise. 'Uuh. It's called cheating, Luke. Using a computer to look up the answers?' He exchanged a significant look with Rani and they swapped a grimly underwhelming high five. So underwhelming it was more like a serious handshake to confirm their alliance in this matter.

Mister Smith's grainy CCTV surveillance of a room of scientists who were all under the impression they were working in top secrecy started to look a distinct shade of maudlin blue. 'Oh. I did not realise this was exclusively a… human activity.' His tone implied the entire human species were massive computer-racists.

There was a split second of awkward silence. Rani's gaze flicked left under the weight of her guilty apology, but Luke looked extremely self-satisfied. 'Hey now, any Smith can be on Team Smith.'

'This is so unfair,' Clyde muttered, leaning in to Rani, who commiserated with a playfully glum expression. She slung a warm arm around him, squeezing his shoulders, and her hair tickled his nose. Clyde leant in, but then he noticed Luke was giving him that _look_ again. He jerked away, and Rani looked surprised and a bit miffed by the sudden reaction, crossing her arms with a sulky head gesture. Luke rolled his eyes at Clyde, and Clyde had no idea why.

He'd have to take him aside later and tell him teenage contempt was supposed to mean something. You couldn't just do it for no reason.

Rani commandeered the wheel thing again, flicking the arrow with much more force than necessary. She spun a badger and Luke picked a green category for them, so they got to mess about with the play-doh on their turn. Clyde wasn't really fussed about it, 'cos it was kids' stuff, but he did explain at length that he was the artist and it was probably best if let him do all the play-doh sculpting. It was fifteen years old and as dry and crumbly as a Slitheen's armpit, so that round needed all the artistic ingenuity they could get.

According to the card Luke selected at random he was supposed to mould a matador.

Half-way through their allotted time, after most of it crumbled from his hands to spread out all over Sarah Jane's floor, Clyde hit upon the brilliant idea to break it up into little squares and lay it out like a 3D mosaic. It was a stunning work of genius, but he was still working on the matador's aquiline nose (broken after a traumatic farmyard accident at the age of eight) when Luke said with the kind of rushed excitement normally reserved for a bomb count down, 'You've only got 30 seconds'.

'A duck,' Rani suggested, as he squidged some droplets of doh into a little Spanish hat. 'A safety pin? No, a dinosaur!'

'A safety pin? Are you kidding me? You aren't even trying.' Cute smile or not, a safety pin was just insulting.

'It's not exactly your best work, Clyde,' she immediately snapped back.

'Time's up!'

'Are you sure it's not a duck?'

Clyde gave Rani his best angry eyebrows, although in all fairness to her it did look kind of like a duck. He fiddled with his suggestions card and considered lying for the sake of their points. But goddammit, it wasn't only their score at stake; it was the principle of his artistry.

'It's a matador, isn't it?' Luke asked, leaning over the board for a closer look.

'Senor Loco won't rest until he's had vengeance upon all bovine species,' Clyde intoned, and then they high-fived. Properly.

'You did not just know that,' Rani accused Luke, poking him in the side with her cards.

He held up his hands in wide-eyed protest, squawking 'Clyde!'

'You just haven't got an eye for _art_, Rani,' Clyde told her, making some last minute alterations to Senor Loco's red flag thing.

They grinned at each other again while Rani grumbled something about boys. 'You're supposed to be on my team, idiot. We're supposed to be trying to win?' Out of petty revenge she shuffled through the cards, looking for a question Luke would have no hope of getting right.

It went just as planned.

'iWatch/i Top of the Pops? Isn't that a radio show?'

'Christ,' Rani said, 'Now I know how mum feels when she goes on at me for not knowing Mick Jagger.'

'The answer, of course, is Celine Dion.'

'No, not again!' Clyde snapped. Rani dragged her hands over her face in frustration.

Luke rubbed K9's head, 'Thanks, K9. Good dog.'

'She was the Mistress's favourite,' K9 intoned, scooting back and forth in doggy delight.

'Celine Dion? Really?' Rani boggled.

Clyde rolled his eyes, smacking one palm with the other, 'Look, you can't have a supergenius boy and a supergenius computer and a supergenius dog on the same team. It's not on!'

Luke pressed a hand over his heart, contriving to look scandalised and grinning the whole time. 'Clyde, how could you? K9 is _family_.'

'My Blackberry's about to become part of my family,' Clyde muttered to Rani, who hid her laughter behind her hand.

'We have something called teamwork in this house,' Luke said airily, adding another handful of tokens to his pile.

'That's it,' she said, amusement in her voice but plain steel in her eyes. 'Clyde, we're going to win this game if it kills us. Don't think this is over, Luke.' She levelled a finger at him before grabbing Clyde's arm and pulling him close.

The pressure of succeeding overcame any bickering and weird girly butterflies in his stomach. They had to step it up now, not just because Rani was too competitive and Luke was too damn smug about his huge collection of penguin tokens. No, they were striking a blow for all normal or slightly thick people everywhere.

It took three hours, four secret meetings in Sarah Jane's linen closet and a pie chart Mister Smith drew up for them to work it out. Like all seemingly unbeatable alien thingies Clyde and Rani have taken down, Team Smith have an exploitable fatal flaw.

Luke motioned right with one arm, moving it up and down frantically before holding up one finger.

'An involuntary spasm of the arm,' K9 diagnosed.

'A common symptom of Dystonia,' Mister Smith started, always prepared to outclass K9. 'Along with a sustained upward deviation of the eyes-'

Luke waved both hands in front of his face and then, not keen to go through the whole sequence for a fourth time, began afresh. He pulled on his ear lobe.

'Ear lobe,' K9 said, 'Composed of areolar and adipose connective tissues.'

'Pinching the ear lobe is recommended to alleviate the symptoms of Dystonia,' said Mister Smith, who apparently didn't see any reason not to continue that particular conversation.

In the end Clyde and Rani won by 45 penguin tokens to 39, after the overly literal and mostly handless Team Smith turned out to be god-awful at charades.


End file.
